HP Moonshot Servers Ship With Intel Atom (ARM, AMD To Come)

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In addition to the new HP Moonshot servers, HP also unveiled the Pathfinder Innovation Ecosystem, which is currently a group of 24 vendors that are developing new hardware and software for the Moonshot architecture.

Also joining the consortium are operating system vendors Canonical, Linaro, Red Hat and SuSE, as well as such ISVs such as Autonomy, Citrix, Couchbase, Cloudera, CyWee, Datastax, Hortonworks, MapR, NuoDB, Parallels and Vertica.

In the near term, HP Moonshot is slated to be available with server cartridges based on the Intel Atom Avoton, the next version of the 64-bit Atom processor that is expected to be the first Atom built using Intel's 22-nanometer process, as well as new ARM processors from Calxeda.

Raejeanne Skillern, director of marketing for cloud computing at Intel, wrote in a Monday blog post that servers based on the Atom Avoton processors are expected to ship in the second half of 2013, and that Moonshot servers based on the Avoton will feature four times the density of those based on the Atom Centerton processors.

"2013 is and will be a great year for Intel and HP Moonshot. We have not only enabled the first Moonshot system to lift-off but with Avoton we will also bring HP Moonshot’s customers a revolution in energy efficiency and performance per watt to drive major TCO improvements when processing lightweight web scale workloads," Skillern wrote.

Karl Freund, vice president of marketing at Calxeda, said in an emailed statement that while HP announced the availability of a single-node Intel Centerton Atom cartridge for Moonshot, a version of Moonshot featuring Calxeda servers should be available within the next quarter or two.

"The fully functional quad-node Moonshot server cartridges working at 1.4 GHz in Calxeda labs now, have 4X the density of Intel Centerton with higher performance per node. Calxeda will be able to support HP's launch schedule to ensure their customers have access to production-quality Calxeda-based Moonshot servers later this year, with up to 180 quad-core EnergyCores in the 4U Moonshot server chassis at 1.4 GHz," Freund wrote.

Unlike Calxeda EnergyCore, Intel's new Centerton chipset has not been available for testing, Freund wrote. We look forward to seeing how well we do against it when it begins shipping. ... As HP has often reiterated, Moonshot is designed to be processor agnostic," he wrote.

Ganthier said that HP has already started training its solution providers in the new HP Moonshot servers, and that the company next months will add channel partner programs around the new servers.

"Moonshot is an extremely important piece of HP's channel strategy," he said.